“Professional Poker Player”
Also
“Decimator of arguments”
“Human encyclopaedia”
“Comedian”
“TV Presenter”
“Only person who has survived living with David Mitchell”
People miss out that the reason some fear flying isn’t the chance of death itself, but how long it takes for you to die once you realize it. It takes a long while for a plane to fall and crash. And it’s usually guaranteed death.
Meanwhile a truck hitting you can kill you fast enough for you to get isikai’d to another realm where you’re reborn as a plane but also the secret final boss of the princess of the car kingdom and must decide between her and the prince, season 2
how long it takes for you to die once you realize it. It takes a long while for a plane to fall and crash. And it’s usually guaranteed death.
Couple misconceptions here
-
Nearly all plane crashes happen on takeoff or landing. Most issues causing a crash from cruise are novel issues that are quickly rectified so they don’t happen again
-
The average person has little to no ability to differentiate a fatal issue from a non-fatal one. Basically every time there is an engine failure on takeoff, half the plane is screaming, “we’re all going to die!” when there is no real cause for concern. It’s the most common issue a multi-engine pilot trains for. Something really catastrophic has to happen for it to be life threatening (such as with the UPS crash a year ago)
-
a truck hitting you can kill you fast enough
oooor, it could snap your neck, paralyze you from the tongue down, leading you to feel nothing but pain for the rest of your life. Or cause permanent brain damage, leading you to only occasionally remember a shred of your former self.
Yeah but technically so can a plane crash if you do survive one as well, but you’ll still get the horror ride first.
The second option is just isikai again though.
Waiter, I’ll have whatever Lumisal is having.
That would be
Reborn as a Plane but also the Secret Final Boss of the Princess of the Car Kingdom and must Decide between Her and the Prince, season 1
I assume the therapist was a woman, but what do I know
One does not simply fly any plane.
But if course your options and security standards are limited by country.
(I have no idea which accident the one I’m question is. But I also assume the therapist will have gone more like ‘isn’t it ironic…’ knowing that was just unlucky statistics)
Don’t let her watch Titanic.
Yes. “Cars are still much more dangerous than any of those modes of transport.”
Climate change is bad yet most humans ignore that. Red meat and processed meat are linked to cancer yet most humans (who can afford) still eat that. Smoking kills yet most humans smoke.
Humans aren’t as rational as they’ll like to be.
Self-driving cars already have a much better safety record, and they’re still under development. But even people who know this are generally way more afraid of the idea than of riding with a human driver.
No. They are still cars. Also, I live in a climate where self driving cars won’t probably work.for like 2 or 3 months of the year.
I’d love to see a self driving car on a normal snow day with the sun glaring in its camera while stuck in a snow bank that the plow left behind. Sometimes there’s a layer of snow on the road, covering the markings, so that nearly two tons self driving machine will get confused and end up stuck everywhere.
Plus even if they dont physically crush people, car tires still emit microplastics that are bad for our health and environment.
https://www.sciencealert.com/almost-50-of-microplastic-pollution-comes-from-cars-heres-why
Parking lots and cars themselves are also contributing to heat island effects and heat up our surroundings.
Cars are a blight on humanity. Fuck cars.
EDIT: Really, we are far from self driving cars anyway. Tesla is faking the footage they show to the public. Waymo has to be remote controlled in some cases. They get stuck everywhere and block emergency services. None of this over enthusiastic tech bro bullshit is even close to being fully functional. Yes, some can drive themselves in controlled environments, but some also get confused easily and end up in bike lanes.
Which is to say: A person’s risk assessment is heavily influenced by the amount of perceived control they have
I wonder if she’s tried a valium and a double bourbon on the rocks as soon as she gets on the plane. Because that works for me.
Victoria Coren is also a TV presenter.
A friend of mine is afraid of flying. He asked me once why I’m not afraid. I told him that every time I board a plane I am accepting the fact that it is possible I might crash and die. He was horrified, but I brought up that driving 80 mph on the highway is the same trade-off, and the difference is just that one allows the illusion of control.
He’s still afraid of flying, but now he’s afraid of driving, too
Driving is many times more dangerous than flying commercially
Traffic kills about 1.2m a year worldwide. Flying kills a few hundred.
Good job improving the rationality of your friend! Now tell him he’s about as likely to die of the flu as he is of a car accident. Then he can have another fear. Either he’ll turn into a house-bound agoraphobe or he’ll realize nothing has changed since before he started worrying about these things.
Now tell him he’s about as likely to die of the flu as he is of a car accident.
That’s not remotely true, even looking at world-wide stats. Flu kills something like 300 to 650k per year. Traffic deaths max about 1200k per year. So even in a really bad flu season, traffic is twice as likely to kill you worldwide. If you’re not looking at everyone combined, and assuming your friend is between 5 and 65 the odd of dying from flu drop a lot, while the odds of a traffic deaths go way up.
The EU has 9.000 flu deaths and 19.000 traffic deaths in 2025/2026.
EDIT: I just realized if your friend is American, that’s actually true. The US had 45.000 flu deaths and 36.000 traffic deaths. sidenote: the US has a population about a third smaller than the EU…
Car deaths in 2024 in America: 44k as per the National Safety Council
Flu deaths in 2024 in America: 45k as per the CDC, but 2024 was higher for flu deaths than some other years.
So it varies, but in North America the number of people who die from flu vs. car accidents is between 60 and 102% as likely.
Car deaths are much higher in some countries than in others, and the same applies to flu deaths, but in places where people are flying more miles are going to have good enough health care to deal with the flu and have traffic safety laws that bring the risk down to the level of flu deaths.
Edit: just saw your edit so looks like we’re mostly on the same page. But even in the EU, do you really think most of them realize that you’re only twice as likely to die from as car crash as you are from the flu?
Respect to both you and your friend for being logically consistent just at different risk thresholds.
However, I will add that it’s not certain whether the risk level of driving is equal for good or bad drivers. It’s not exactly an illusion of control. You really do have more control. If it were somehow possible to reliably separate people who died in a car into groups of people that were driving responsibly versus not driving responsibly, I don’t know if that would look as dangerous as an airplane or not… But it seems fair to estimate that it wouldn’t be.
Airplanes are so much safer than cars, it’s not even close. Cars are certainly more dangerous regardless of the driver, even if the safest drivers had 10x fewer deaths than average. (which is probably unrealistic, because even if you drive perfectly at 25mph, you can still be killed by some idiot going 100)
Transport safety is measured in macro scale by how many deaths/injuries/incidents/etc. per person-km travelled. For example, if there’s 100 people on a plane that travels 1000km, then 100 people travelled 1000km, so that one flight is 100,000 person-kilometers. If one person drives a car 1000km, then that’s just 1000 person-km.
Planes are in the range 0.07 incidents per billion person-km. Cars are 3.7 per billion. Motorcycles are over 100.
Motorcycles are more dangerous than I thought! Would have thought a factor of 4 maybe.
They’re still safer (at least for certain kinds of injury) than horses, so if your young daughter wants a pony, get her a racing bike instead.
Motorcycles also generally only carry 1-2 people, so the person-km to vehicle-km ratio is closer to 1 compared to other forms of transportation. They’re also unstable, small and tend to be operated even more carelessly than cars.
Something is off with your statistic. Can you provide a source?
Planes being only ~50x safer per passenger mile doesn’t sound right. Is that including all planes? General aviation is far more dangerous than commercial aviation, which might skew the statistic
Per passenger mile commercial aviation should be at least 100x safer than cars, I would think
Motorcycles are over 100.
Only in America, where motorcycles are a toy people with too much money and issues with their self-image buy to play with on weekends, 1/3 of which involve drinking, a significant number not wearing helmets, and are mostly dipshits who drive off the road taking a corner incorrectly. It’s much safer in the rest of the world.
I’d be surprised if southeast asia is more safe than the US in traffic deaths
The problem is everyone drinking then riding a bike with a phone in 1 hand and a cigarette in the other, wearing a thin plastic hat with zero protection instead of a helmet and ignoring red lights.
But if the anti-drunk-motorcycling initiatives are a bit more successful like they have been for car operation in the US, and they continue to expand the bus system while lowering cost, it will be much safer than the US, just because everyone rides so slow and cars watch out for bikes. I have literally never seen road rage or people being a dick by trying to block someone from passing in Vietnam, meanwhile every motorcyclist in the US has had cars intentionally block them from filtering/splitting, yell at them, or try to push them out of their lane. Hell even on Lemmy I have had random car-brains tell me I am endangering them by splitting or passing traffic in ways cars can’t.
Over the last 2 years, since cops starting watching the worst lights and put cameras at a lot, I’ve seen many fewer people going 3+ seconds during a red light. I think it will be uncommon in a few more years.
I have literally never seen road rage or people being a dick by trying to block someone from passing in Vietnam,
Entirely true, but then I’ve only ever seen 300 mopeds/motorcycles line up across both lanes of an intersection and just weave through eachother when the light goes green (or before) in Asia. On the other hand, I’ve never seen it go wrong.
meanwhile every motorcyclist in the US has had cars intentionally block them from filtering/splitting, yell at them, or try to push them out of their lane. Hell even on Lemmy I have had random car-brains tell me I am endangering them by splitting or passing traffic in ways cars can’t.
Carbrains are the weirdest people. “How dare you not make traffic worse like I am?!” is such a uniquely shit take. Buuuut, I do see plenty of lane splitting at >50km/h here in europe too.
Aviation is safe because every accident gets thoroughly investigated and precipates changes to equipment and/or procedures to lessen the risk of it happening again. After decades of this, we’ve ironed out most of the common problems.
Meanwhile, car accidents are met with a shrug. We continue to build bad traffic patterns, rely on outdated ‘common sense’ speed enforcement, fail to enforce real licensing standards, loose body shape regulations etc. etc. Basically the only thing we DO do for cars - making them safer in the event of a crash is one thing we absolutely do not do for airplanes.
Meanwhile, car accidents are met with a shrug. We continue to build bad traffic patterns, rely on outdated ‘common sense’ speed enforcement, fail to enforce real licensing standards
Who’s this “we”?
Greetings from the Netherlands.
I used to think that, too. But lately, I’ve started to consider that even more people are even worse drivers than I thought. And I think that really changes things.
Also, that common airplane statistic about deaths is usually reported in terms of passenger miles, which I think is a little misleading since airplanes intrinsically travel many more miles. It would be more meaningful to measure deaths per trip or better yet deaths per passenger hour rather than miles. However, I did find some lawyer websites saying that the lifetime odds of dying in a plane crash are around 1 in 800,000,000 versus 1 in 95 for cars.
Now I know it seems deranged on the face of it, but hear me out.
For driving to be as safe as flying, we would need someone to be about 8500 times less likely to die over the course of their life driving. Most people drive 5 days a week, for about 50 years, so 13000 days driving. So:
The odds of surviving a day of safe driving= S
Odds of surviving a day of dangerous driving= D
8500=S^13000 / D^13000 = (S/D)^13000
S/D = 8500^(1/13000) = 1.0007
So if driving safer on day made you even 0.07% more likely to survive that day, then that gives us that 8500x increase over a lifetime.
Now…I know this is based on that 1/95 which ALREADY includes the safe drivers. So the legitimacy of this estimate depends on how many drivers you think are safe. This is why my estimate of that ratio caused me to change my mind. I feel like only around 15% of people drive at that level of safety. So, of course, in some sense this still means that driving in general is more dangerous because you have an 85% chance of being one of the people for whom it is more dangerous. But I still think there’s something to be said for the minority of truly cautious and defensive drivers.
Acknowledging other failure points here, most airplane deaths are in private aviation, so that may make the bar harder to clear again. But I think the whole 13000 days estimate demonstrates how even tiny improvements there can easily account for large changes, too.
No amount of good driving can safe you against someone driving the wrong way without lights in the night on the highway, or people running red lights while you make a turn. Air travel has the innate advantage of three dimensional mobility and the drivers being under a lot more scrutiny, giving everyone a lot more space to keep distance from one another compared to roads. Also, airplanes are being inspected and repaired a lot more consequently than the average car or truck.
Also, the majority of drivers say that they are above average drivers, which tells you how well adjusted the view of driving skills is in general.
I don’t think you understand just how big of a difference it is. Flying on a plane is one of the most regulated things ever, and despite crashes getting tons of media attention actully dying on a commercial flight is so rare that you are basically in no more danger on a plane than you are just sitting on a random bench in the park.
To put this in perspective in the year 2023 72 people died worldwide from aviation accidents.
In that same year 40k people died in the US alone from car accidents.
To put it further into perspective more people die on planes from random health events that just happened to occur while they were on a plane, like a cardiac event, than they do from actual plane related accidents.
When you’re going down a highway at 70 mph and relying on everyone else to navigate traffic with you following the same rules, written and unwritten, it sure as hell is an illusion of control.
I’ll cede that you’re correct you as an individual do have more control over the vehicle you’re in. However, you’re still at the whims of the simulation we live in - physics doesn’t just stop and the unpredictable nature of other drivers makes it impossible to have total control over the situation.
Even driving alone on a road there are animals that could jump out, or a pothole or debris etc etc. That’s like the maximum control you can have and even then it’s not absolute.
I think, unfortunately, it will take widespread adoption of self-driving cars to reduce accident fatalities much further from where they are now. But that’s not likely to happen for many years on, cars and horses were hanging out together on roads for a long time afaik - feel free to correct me.
Anyways I get your point , and anecdotally I’m sure we all have had moments driving where we thought “if I wasn’t driving the car would have gotten into an accident” so yeah I’d say we all have that same feeling.
They’re not being logically consistent. Being afraid of flying, but okay with driving is inherently irrational. Driving is far more dangerous
The best driver in the world is at far more risk than the average commercial jet
It’s an incredible difference in safety. Cars are not safe
The majority of people involved in automobile collisions are not at fault. Yes, “good” drivers (who still make mistakes on account of fragile carbon bodies) have less risk, but we’re talking a fraction of a fraction here.
True but what really matters in this case is how often the people who weren’t at fault die, and how often the people who were at fault die. I haven’t seen as clear of data on that
Air France 447 is why I hate flying and has everything to do with control.
Don’t tell him that he could just keel over dead at any moment from an embolism or something.
Damn you really made it worse lol
A woman was afraid of flying on a plane. She expressed her fears to her friend; “What if someone brings a bomb on the plane?”
“Lady, the chances of that happening are a million to one.”
“What about the chances of TWO people each bringing a bomb onto the plane?”
“…That’d be even more ridiculous. That would be something like a quadrillion to one.”So now, that woman always feels perfectly safe flying on a plane - as long as she always brings a bomb with her.
You see, I think the conditional probability of someone bringing a bomb onto a plane given someone else brought one is a lot higher than the probability that someone brought one on the plane in the first place; people are likely to work together on that kind of ‘project’ and may want some degree of redundancy.
This is reminds me of geek shit, old school,intelligent Internet that I need more of in my life.
Only travels by rail or boat
Hmm. Grocery shopping must be quite a chore.
If you live in a car brained city. Living in big cities in France and Japan, I always did groceries by foot. It adds a bit of weight lifting too as a bonus.
She lives in London, so probably not.
Getting groceries through the Underground is still a chore. Better to walk or bike.
I’ve never tried shopping by boat though, maybe that’s super convenient.
once you dig the canals from home to the market it gets surprisingly easier.
Living in England it’s entirely possible she could take a canal boat to the market. Their recreational canal system is kind of impressive.
and if you have one those super nice live-in boats, you can literally take your house to the market.
Not sure I blame anyone for having a fear of flying these days assuming you’ve seen how cheaply boeing has been servicing their planes.
Your Boeing to die.
It’s not just the plane servicing, it is all sectors of the industry being squeezed.
Professional TV host, Screenwriter, Book Writer and Comedian who happens to do Poker as a side thing but it’s not her main thing, btw
Also she’s married now, it’s Victoria Coren-Mitchell
Well, she is good at doing all those things, but she’s one of the best poker players in the world, as far as I can tell. It’s not what she’s most well known for though.
I had no idea she was a poker player. Thought she was a professional contestant on british panel shows!
Probably depends on where you live, and what you’re into,by how you know of her?
Low key always crushed on her though.
Also same on the last sentence, a funny genius with a dry wit, I can see why David fell for her
I know she’s one of the greats at it and all, but as a big fan of UK comedy and a knower of the existence of game shows, I’d staunchly refute the suggestion that “professional poker player” is her main claim to fame except in professional poker fandom specifically 😄
Either way, she’s probably the smartest person on the comedy panel show circuit and I’m including Brian Cox when I say that 😄
PS: I also ADORE her hilarious husband, comedy pedantry world champion David Mitchell 😁
I’d like to see her in Last One Laughing. She’s got such a different approach to comedy than her husband, and I bet she’d be killer at it.
She is not the (kinda decent?) 2027 list.
(Huh, they did a UK Halloween special? Missed it.)
on*
Lol, thx
Kinda decent? Ayoade is back, and Katherine Ryan and Morgana Robinson are joining? That will be great
Yes (the other Katherine & Lee too)! And how I expect all those to interact with each other.
I want to see Richard Ayoade, Sam Campbell, and James Acaster locked in the same room.
and Joe Wilkinson
Came here to say all of this 👆
Smart can mean a lot of very different things, and on TV it’s a bit easier to “be smart” … eg on Taskmaster (random tasks with wide open thinking) she came across as smart once (I’m not saying she isn’t smart, I have about the same opinion about her, but having read a lot of things & be a bit ‘quick’ is just one aspect of smart is all I’m trying to say).
She’s a world class poker player, a comedian & an Oxford graduate, I think she does quite a few smart things, one being marrying David Mitchell.
Def agree.
Taskmaster is kinda designed to break smart people and get them to do dumb/silly things.
She was wonderful on Taskmaster and I never thought less of her intelligence, that’s just what happens to people on the show.
I adored her on Taskmaster! Loved her completely!
Huh. Didn’t know she used to be a professional poker player.
An exceptional one at that. She’s in the Poker Hall of Fame. She was the first woman to win an EPT main event and the first person to win two EPT main events.
She also directed porn.
Anyway everything else in her career pales in comparison to Only Connect.
Bit of a funny contrast, considering that her husband is quite reserved, being rather uncomfortable when something approaching that matter came up on Would I Lie to You. (He was okay with that, since he’s one of the main cohosts, and it’s doubtful it would have been recorded if he wasn’t).
This is amazing! For my intellectual curiosity, what did she direct?!
A very special edition of Question Time.
Damn, I was hoping for Countdown
Cuntdown
That’s funny, I only know her from poker. I’ll have to check out her comedy!
She’s an amazing woman - definitely a role model
Totally watching some only connect later today
